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This article is by Joann Peck, associate professor of marketing and associate dean for undergraduate programs at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research explores how consumers engage with products through touch.

Google Glass.

These days, you can’t go online or watch the news without hearing about a new product that removes touch from the user experience. The recently released Samsung Galaxy S4 is generating buzz with touchless features including text scrolling that responds to users’ eye movements and video that automatically pauses if you look away from the screen while watching.
Google Glass — the most talked-about device of the year—removes touch from the smartphone experience entirely, using eye movements and voice commands to make calls, send email and surf the web.

Before we herald touchless technology as the wave of the future, I want to sound a note of caution. Although touch can be inconvenient at times, it is a crucial element of people’s engagement with the world. The goal should be not to eliminate it, but to become smarter about how we use it.

For example, removing touch from the shopping experience can have serious consequences for profits. Shoppers use touch to assess product attributes like temperature, texture, weight and softness, and we know shoppers are less confident in their decisions when they are not able to touch products.

What’s more, touch in shopping has implications far beyond product information.Touch creates a sense of ownership. Shoppers are more likely to buy an item—and are willing to pay more for it—once they’ve handled it. And touch has an emotional effect: it generates good feelings among people with a high need for autotelic (gratuitous or self-soothing) touch.

In the online retail world, a touch-free experience is a liability, not a bragging point, and companies have come up with creative strategies to compensate for the absence of touch. They offer detailed product descriptions and sophisticated zoom features that show texture.When a website uses evocative language,this can help inspire a sense of ownership as well as supply product information.Our research has shown that people are more likely to buy an object—and pay more for it—if they spend time imagining touching that object.

When companies like Zappos offer free shipping and friendly return policies, they are effectively letting customers test-drive products before making a final decision. This fosters a sense of ownership: Once the product is in a customer’s hands, she sees it as her own. Warby Parker lets customers try on five pairs of eyeglasses at home and choose one to keep; we know people often keep more than one pair.

In South Korea, the grocery chain Homeplus (a division of
Tesco) has developed a hybrid of online and brick-and-mortar experiences. Its “virtual grocery stores,” constructed on subway platforms and in other public areas, target professionals who are too busy to fit in a trip to the supermarket. The virtual store is a series of backlit billboards resembling grocery-store shelves. Shoppers find the items they need in the photograph, scan the items’ QR codes using their smartphones and place orders for home delivery—all while waiting for the train.

In a way, the Homeplus model still involves an element of touch. A video of customers shopping in the virtual stores shows them using gestures, pointing and even reaching out to touch the pictures, and then, of course, swiping on their smartphone screens as they navigate the purchasing process. (This swiping motion may be inherently soothing. People use a side-to-side hand movement to assess smoothness and softness when touching products, so we suspect this movement has a corresponding emotional effect hardwired into our brains—at least for touch-oriented individuals—and we are designing a study to test this.)

There are cases in which less touch is clearly better. Touch-free faucets, soap dispensers and hand dryers reduce our exposure to germs. Cars that drive themselves could eliminate the danger of texting while driving. But even in cases where a touch-free experience seems desirable, there may be implications we haven’t considered.

As technological innovation generates more substitutes for touch, we should keep in mind that touch isn’t just functional. It has emotional, psychological and behavioral implications. The goal should be not to eliminate touch, but to understand more about how it operates and become smarter about how we use it.

Perhaps as the use of touch becomes less common, shopping experiences that incorporate touch will become a luxury, with consumers paying more to get this rare commodity. Touch may be increasingly seen as low-tech, but I don’t think it will completely disappear from product interactions. Humans’ need for touch—for informational and emotional purposes—is too fundamental and too deep.